at one time a strange shadow
by TrappedInPast
Summary: She does nothing dramatic. He thinks she’s trying to respect his dignity. He almost laughs. All his dignity is shot to hell now and it has been for a long time, but still, her consideration is appreciated. Literati Oneshot.


**Author's Note: **When I say hot off the press, I mean hot off the press. I just finished this maybe two minutes ago. No revising, no editing, so forgive any grammatical errors. I'm going away and I wanted to post this first; also, I kind of think the story gets dilluted if I go over it too many times. But perhaps that's just laziness.

**Summary: **Basically we're looking at a redux of the painful scene for Literati people, when Jess confesses his love to Rory. Yes, it's been done sixty trillion times, but this one is a little different.

**Rating: **A heavier PG-13, for swearing and sex references.

**Disclaimer: **Mmhmm . . .

Thank you to everyone who faithfully review my stories. It really means everything.

Merry late Christmas!

* * *

"You are here. Oh, you do not run away.  
You will answer me to the last cry.  
Cling to me as though you were frightened.  
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes."

-Pablo Neruda, _Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair_

* * *

He doesn't remember anything anymore. There was a plan, dammit, there was, but he's forgotten it and now he's standing in front of her empty-handed, watching his breath freeze like smoke, little warm molecules smacking into little cold ones (that's the evidence, he _is_ alive, look, for chrissake, look). Expectation is etched into every line of her face. He thinks bitterly that she should know better than to expect anything from him after all this, and for a second suspended in time it is just her, her, her, but the suspended second snaps (like so many other things).

It is now that he remembers exactly why he always slips away in the shadows as opposed to saying goodbye. It hurts, this moment, this look, his fists clenched. It fucking hurts and he did this to himself (suicide: Hemingway used a shotgun, like a man, and all he has is a self help book and a pile of shit car that can't even make it out of Connecticut).

Say it, dammit, say it, scramble for release, for consummation, anything, I-came-back-doesn't-that-mean-anything-to-you-can't-you-see-how-this-is-killing-me?

"Can we . . . sit down?"

Her eyes flash (he did this to her and she has not forgotten). "No," she spits, and his ribcage contracts a little bit. He wants to interrupt her, wants to talk about the streetlights reflecting in the crystal blue of her eyes and ask her why she cut her hair short and tell her he read _Atlas Shrugged _over the summer on the beach when he could think of nothing else but her strawberry lip gloss and her saddle shoes. But he will never do this. His jaw sets and he takes it like a man (God, he wish he could show her the tear in his chain metal, but he can't). "You wanted to talk, so talk. What do you have to say to me?"

The blade is poised, ready to fall (_'Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation'_). He wants to show her but he knows she wouldn't be able to stand it so he grits his teeth and looks at her and tells her silently that this is his bruised gift of honesty, the one she always wanted but he could never find (the truth, dammit, the truth, don't let it escape this time, hold onto it, tighter, tighter, moremoremoremore) –

"I love you."

Everything in her face stills. Everything on the planet stills. He can bear many burdens (an alcoholic mother, abuse, knife wounds) but he can not bear this one (love) so he has just deposited it at her feet, the first time in his life he has dropped anything.

She doesn't breathe.

There is a sudden desire to mutter, _'Never mind, I didn't mean it.'  
_

He figures driving three thousand miles just to lie is a little pathetic, though, so he doesn't.

(He looks at her kind of helplessly and wishes he could hold her so that she wouldn't stare at him as if he were her jailer, so that she wouldn't shake like she's shaking now.)

(He doesn't. Hold her, that is.)

Silence (is the only thing he has to give). He knows better to stay and she cannot speak to ask him to and he turns around and he's leaving, leaving, leaving, festival sounds bleeding slowly back into his brain that was just hit with an eighteen-wheeler careening down the side of Mount Everest, salvation in the form of his car, just walk a little further, disciple, a little further, God, he needs to smoke, to scream, to die, something, anything that will make this numbness go _away_ –

He doesn't feel the touch on his elbow at first. Or maybe he does, but her small hand has the potential to become a fifty-ton anchor and he already can't breathe.

Then she's standing in front of him, in the middle of the street, and her face isn't as blank anymore. He's almost irrationally furious.

Her lips part as if she's going to say something (don't, please), but there is nothing more to say. Her look asks him if he meant it and the way he can't meet her eyes because he is too scared to let her touch his temporarily unguarded soul answers yes.

He licks his lips, top and bottom, feeling the sting against cold night air.

She does nothing dramatic. He thinks she's trying to respect his dignity. He almost laughs. All his dignity is shot to hell now and it has been for a long time, but still, her consideration is appreciated.

There's a moment (a terrifyingly fragile, drawn-out-on-a-glass-shard moment) in which he looks at his car behind her and she stares at his shoes. Then, hesitantly and wordlessly, she steps closer to him.

He wonders idly if he will ever feel like this again, skimming the surface of hell while breathing her citrus shampoo.

"You aren't going to stay, are you?"

He swallows.

"No."

Everything about her crumbles for a moment, but she does not cry. He wonders if she cried when he left and thinks probably not. It would be too much of an offering to him and he does not deserve it.

All of the sudden, running doesn't seem like an escape anymore. Running doesn't seem much of anything at all, an inevitable sentence passed down from something he cannot control.

"I want to be able to stay mad at you," she whispers, and he feels her lip brush the cold metal of his zipper. He closes his eyes (_'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I meant to leave you here and I didn't realize I was taking you with me.') _and says nothing. "I shouldn't forgive you."

And then he would like to say even less than nothing, he would like to become nothing, to disappear, because she is absolutely and unquestionably right and it's strangling him. He does not deserve one glance from her direction. This is the first time in his life he regrets being undeserving.

"What do you want from me?" She asks, stepping back a little, meeting his eyes. The question shocks him like forty-thousand volts and he has to steady himself for a moment.

"Nothing," he tells her. He would like to believe that he has accepted his damnation with the dark hooded eyes of one who has been taught that his soul was born to be damned. He would like to believe that he will demand nothing that is not his anymore.

"That's not true," she whispers.

He looks away to the sidewalk.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Her cell phone rings nine separate times before she finally switches it off. He watches the screen glow blue and then cut swiftly to black. She tucks it in her pocket.

The stars are freezing and tiny and hard and very far away, miniscule pearls scattered across the universe. Dammit, he's been reading too much Steinbeck.

"Are you cold?" He finally asks, the roof of his car like a sheet of ice against his back. His words seem swallowed up into the vacuum of silence from where they've pulled off the highway fifteen miles outside of Stars Hollow.

She shakes her head. Then she nods. Finally she sighs and blows a piece of hair away from her lips. He watches the single strand do a slow, pirouetting dance in the light breeze. "I don't know."

He swallows and almost says, _'Me too.' _There is a foot of space between them that feels more insurmountable than three thousand miles ever did.

"Why did you leave California?"

He catches the hidden subcurrents (_'What the hell were you thinking, throwing away what we had for a few months by the beach?')_. He swallows the scream on the tip of his tongue and his face becomes a study in removal.

"Didn't work out."

She does not ask for details. He continues, with just as monotonous a voice:

"I had to leave."

He's not talking about California anymore. He knows she seamlessly catches this by the way a stiff, glittering tear forces its way down her cheek. It would give him some sort of closure to be able to catch it and press it into his thumb, but he can't move.

"I hated you for not telling me," she murmurs.

He has no response.

"I left everything for you." Her words are so soft and muffled that he has a feeling she didn't mean to say them out loud. It is for this reason, and this reason only, he tells himself, that they cause a fissure in his chest.

He pretends to be fascinated by the constellations he cannot name. "Maybe you shouldn't have," he says without looking at her. "Maybe you should've stayed where you were safe."

The air stills with her body. She turns to stare at him (she should slap him, tear him apart, kill him for what he has just suggested to her, but she doesn't). Her eyes are electric amongst all of this dark night and he wants to look away but, dammit, he can't.

"You can't base forever on safe," she says.

He lets out a rattling sigh in place of crying, which would be too out of character.

There is not a foot between them any more. She's kissing him, and he can't tell if there's more pain or pleasure (perhaps they're the same now?). He leans over her on his elbows and pushes her hard against the car roof.

The stars seem much bigger reflected in her eyes than they are in the sky.

He would be amused if he didn't feel like he was being reborn at the moment.

- - - - - - - -

The guilt doesn't actually hit him until he's helped her from the back seat up to the front again an hour and a half later. He jogs around to the driver's side, gets in, and hazards a glance at her. That's when he sees all of his transgressions sprayed over her body in red ink as if she were the Book of Life and his name was crossed out on every inch of her skin.

Her jacket is stashed by her feet and her blouse is hanging half off of her shoulder. There are delicate branding marks from him across her neck that she will have to rearrange her scarf to cover. Her lips are swollen and bruised. Her makeup is smeared and her eyes are glassy and her hair is stuck to her neck with sweat, despite the frost on the ground.

She must notice the minute change in his eyes when she reaches out for his arm and he jumps back as though he has been burned (he is no more than a thief, the one thing he has fought his whole life never to be). Her eyes focus.

"Don't you dare be sorry," she demands viciously, grabbing his hand and forcing it against her temple.

"I screwed up."

"You didn't. Not this time."

"It shouldn't have been like this, not for you. Jesus, Rory, I never wanted it to -"

"It was beautiful," she says, softer now. "You took care of me and held me and stayed with me and I don't regret any of it."

He wonders idly when she became braver than him.

"I love you," she whispers.

His hand tightens around hers.

"Did I hurt you?"

"Only by waiting too long."

He gives her an almost-grin. She smiles back and when he turns on the car, he keeps the gear in park. They listen to Velvet Revolver without exchanging a word.

(And everything's almost okay.)

- - - - - - - - -

She falls asleep somewhere around two o'clock in the morning. When she does, the carefully embalmed bubble around them breaks and he becomes the pragmatist again. He can be practical when he has to be. Sometimes it's difficult to tell.

When he pulls up in front of her house, he cuts the headlights. He doesn't wake her up. He can't. He sits back and stares at the stained and ripped ceiling, listening to the thump of his heartbeat and wondering why he never noticed it before.

She looks like a painting. He studies her as if she were one. It would be safer.

_You can't base forever on safe._

He swears under his breath and rolls down his window so he can smoke a cigarette.

- - - - - - - - - -

Her wake up process is a painfully slow one. A sigh, a stretch, a shift of her head. It takes exactly eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds for the entire ritual to be over and her eyelids to achingly ease open. Dawn has not yet smashed into the east.

She looks out the window, recognizes her porch, and shudders.

He says nothing. His hands grip tighter on the steering wheel, like he's flying uncontrollably down a highway at six hundred miles per hour, trying valiantly to pull himself out of an inevitable catastrophe.

Oh, wait, isn't he?

"I didn't ask you to bring me here!"

Her voice is louder than she apparently expected it to be. Her eyes widen in fear. He would like desperately to ease it but his hands are empty and he has nothing to offer except for the shredded, tangled mass of unkept promises he has carefully laid in her palms (_they (I) are yours now, do what you have to do_).

He remains silent. His compressed lips answer, _'I had to.'_

She stares at him with something like mingled horror and closes her eyes, leaning back against the headrest to take shallow breaths. Finally, quieter but no more collected, she says with a trace of wonder, "You're leaving me here."

His tongue (_"a nameless nomadic wanderer, who could take nothing with him on his descent into everlasting anonymity") _is heavy with a thousand blistering graffiti marks of what he really means and what he has really lost and what he is really trying to find. He will never share any of this with her. It's not his fault, not really. He just doesn't know how.

"I came to you," she goes on, still with that childish disbelief in her voice, "and I gave you everything I had, the _only thing _I had, and I forgave you because I need you . . ."

He doesn't trust himself to speak, so he shakes his head.

"I need you," she whispers (his car has suddenly become a confessional box).

He scoffs at this. It's an automatic response that he can't quite package in. She looks at him with absolutely betrayed eyes and he is forced to explain himself. "C'mon, Rory," he says, staring straight ahead. "You don't need me."

"I do!"

"You need a distraction, a temporary fix, a damn Faulkner novel and a cup of coffee in your Yale dorm. You don't need me."

She looks at him with an open mouth, but the guilt he would feel is diluted by the vindication that underlies it all (she is better off without him, he was right, even after everything he is still right). He remembers what she tastes like and he figures that if she didn't have some blind, misplaced faith in humanity she would have run away from him and not let him touch her at all.

That makes it seem even more sacrilegious.

Once upon a time she would have wilted like a bruised reed, but she is stronger now (she did lose her heart once). "Stop with the martyr act. You aren't cut out for it," she says coldly.

"Stop with the Mother Teresa act. No one deserves it," he answers blandly, removing a cigarette from his carton.

"I gave you my virginity."

His fingers tighten.

"I shouldn't have taken it."

"I wanted you to."

Mulling by himself while she was sleeping has given him much (dangerous) time to sort this out under the stained file folders in his brain, and he's ready for this. He says quietly, "You wanted to save me."

One of her tears hits his gear stick. He can't look at it.

She searches his face, but it is stone and releases nothing. "Is that so bad?"

Nothing.

"I wanted you. I want you. Don't make me leave."

Nothing.

Her fingers are on the cold metal handle before he hisses, "Rory."

She turns to him and he stares at the dark shapes of trees in her yard (where she sometimes sits in her cake pajamas, sprawled out on the grass with a bowl of marshmallows and a copy of _Through the Looking Glass_).

"I can't let . . . You can't . . ." He sighs, angry with himself for his inability to remain silent, and rakes a hand through his tangled black hair. "I can't take everything away from you."

She nods and opens the door, not looking at him when she says, "You already have."

It's damn pathetic that he is this scared of getting what he wants, but he does not know what to do with so much silver running through his fingers at once so he drops it and runs, just like he always does, because he is only half a man and half a man does not have the right to hold anything quite like this. He is searching rather desperately for that other half, and he wants to tell her this, but he is terrified she will reveal to him that this other half resides in her palms.

He kicks open the door. She's almost up her steps.

"I meant it." He doesn't have to specify as to what, for she still cradles close to her the only burden he ever dropped.

She swallows and zips up her jacket, studying the railing. Finally, she answers, "I know you did."

"I just can't . . . stay here . . . yet."

The unspoken promise in those words is rather illuminating to both of them. It takes him a moment to comprehend it, and once he does, he doesn't take it back.

She makes him swear nothing else, since a promise that he intends to keep is rare and glittering and she tucks it away carefully next to a few others (_I came back, just wanted to, I love you_).

"I don't regret it," she states unashamedly instead.

The fear has ebbed away enough to where he can remove himself if he wants to. He looks at her. "I can't regret it." The silent _'because it was my salvation' _rings though the air like cricket whispers do in the summer.

Then he's back in his car. The engine catches the third time. He backs out of her driveway as she looks on, and he wonders if it's easier for her this time, if it's easier for her to watch him as he leaves. He was a selfish bastard for assuming he could spare her the pain originally.

She left an earring on the dashboard, but he doesn't think he'll return it yet. He remembers what he whispered in her ear right when he entered her (_"I'm here."_). He remembers how she cried and how he kissed away her tears and how she shook with an indescribable emotion that was not sad. Not really. He would like to be able to tell her those two words all the time.

He changes lanes to get on the interstate.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Five months later, his apartment in New York is still shitty and his job still sucks and he's still smoking, but something's different.

He's finished a manuscript.

It's taken endless weeks of shaking hands and booze and this mounting frustration with himself, with everything that he is, with everything he was supposed to be, dammit. He has finally awoken to the idea that he must have had potential once and he let it rot and grow stagnant all on his own. It's a painful realization he thinks he will have to either live with or fix.

He chooses the latter.

The moment he seals the manuscript in an envelope, he looks around for a pen and a piece of paper. The pen isn't difficult to find, but all of his notebooks are full and the printer is empty. He ransacks the cupboards for a napkin, ignoring his roommate's drunken protests. Eventually he finds one. On it, he writes three words: _'This is yours.'_ He slides it in the envelope next to the manuscript and mails it twenty minutes later.

He says nothing when she calls him, just simply presses the green button and listens without breathing. She is silent for a full thirty seconds.

Finally, she whispers, "Thank you."

He is ashamed but it is a good shame that purges him a little. He holds a lighted cigarette in one hand and delicately crushes it into the windowsill while muttering, "It's not like the next damn Great American novel or anything."

That's when he can hear her smile like he used to be able to, and it makes him think of sunsets and diners and leather couches and happier times. "It's enough."

He bites his lip to keep from grinning. "Yeah?"

She sighs with pleasure and he feels the blood pumping to entire body with such a distinctive pound he wonders if it has been stopped up for the last five months. "Yeah."

_(It is strange, he thinks when she shows up at his apartment the following week, that he has been running from and toward the same thing for so long, but it feels kind of good to have finally made up his mind. He presses an earring in her hand, but she tells him to keep it.)_

* * *

"How you must have suffered against getting accustomed to me,  
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.  
So many times have we seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,  
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans."

-Pablo Neruda,_ Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair_

* * *


End file.
